


I Need to Get Back

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (Pun not intended), Ambiguous/Open Ending, At Last I am Free of It, But It's Done So Here We Are, Fluff and Angst, I Sold My Soul to the Clown Movie, I Worry This is Too Soft, I've Had This in My Head Since September, M/M, Maybe We're the Real Clowns for Shipping These Assholes, Missing Scene, These Boys are Feral to the Bone, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Yet Another Hammock Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-24 18:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22022779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: It's the first memory he can grasp with both hands.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 51





	I Need to Get Back

It’s not the first memory that comes back to him.

On the trip up to Maine, memories are like rainbows in an oil slick, half-grasped shadows that slide in and out of his mind, slippery as eels. They’re more general, things like the house where he grew up, his math teacher, what the main street looked like. How the week of Christmas literally everything shut down and the town was covered in snow. How the carnival was the one big thing everyone looked forward to in the summer because nothing fucking happens in a small town.

It’s like the scene is being set for a drama. There’s nothing too specific. It’s just the crew setting up the stage, the narrator of _Our Town_ with his line of chalk.

Then he walks into the restaurant and sees the curve of a face, the shoulders that are still fucking tight and clenched, the dark hair stubbornly wrestled into combed submission, and the memory slams into him with such force that Richie feels like getting hit by a train would be kinder.

It’s fucking shameful, is what it is, that he can tell who Eddie is just by looking at the guy from behind. Not even in a perverted way although his stupid fucking useless brain is already coming up with a bunch of jokes about Eddie’s ass because that’s apparently all he’s good for. But he had no fucking clue who Ben was until he said his name, and the only reason he remembered who Bev was is, well, unless one of his friends had a very big secret they were keeping or had a huge and unexpected life change, there was only ever one girl in the Losers Club. But Eddie? Oh no, he gets one look at Eddie’s ramrod straight back and his combed-down hair and he’s thrust back in time like a shitty science fiction movie, sixteen years old and in a hammock and trying not to die from suppressing The Gay.

So yeah if you want to be technical about it, it’s not the first memory that comes back to him. Sweet, loyal Mike and unparalleled terror and then shortly after that his childhood bedroom all win that competition.

But it’s the first solid memory. It’s the first one he can grasp with both hands.

* * *

Nobody but them comes to their underground clubhouse anymore.

Mostly because there’s no one left to come, besides Mike.

Bev said she’d write and call, and for a few months she did—about six months, to be exact, and Richie knows this because Ben told him—but then it stopped. Bill was next, his parents wanting to get away from the ghost of Georgie that still haunted the house. Richie wanted to tell the Denbroughs that the ghost was just imagined, and that he’s seen real ones, but they wouldn’t listen.

Bill never wrote or called at all.

Ben was third, his dad getting a new job again, and there was this architecture camp that he wanted to go to. That was just over a year ago, now.

Stan left in January, with the new year. It’s July, and Richie hasn’t heard from his best friend once.

“How did Bev remember for six months and none of them did?” he asked Eddie one time.

“Ben told me,” Eddie had replied, “that she only remembered us when she bled. The rest of the time she didn’t know we existed.”

That had been fucking terrifying for a lot of reasons. One because he knows how Bev is about blood, how her dad and the people in their shitty town made the idea of being a woman shameful to her. Two because how does it feel to only remember the people you love while you’re in pain. Three because how did you forget someone the rest of the time. How did you do that?

It’s July, and he’s sixteen, and the future looms in front of him like a terrifying monster, one he’d almost trade in for a werewolf if he had the chance, and he has no answers to anything. Sometimes, he wishes he was thirteen again, when it felt like he always had the answers. Or, if he didn’t, then one of his friends did. The Losers Club was not lacking in know-it-alls. The only one who cheerfully never knew jack shit was Beverly, who held the championship title for Most Chaotic.

With everyone gone, the clubhouse has become Their Place. His and Eddie’s. Nobody but Mike knows it exists, so they’re never disturbed down here. They read comics, and do homework, and nap in the hammock. It’s dirty and dusty down here, and he keeps waiting for Eddie to make them go somewhere else, but Eddie never does—even if sometimes it feels far too empty and large in here, the imprints of his friends’ absences feeling like a tangible entity. The only place that feels more haunted is the quarry.

Richie tries not to shift too much. They’re in the hammock, Eddie’s legs interlocked with his, his one hand on Eddie’s calf to keep them both balanced, and they’re making it work despite being far bigger than they were when they first started this habit of theirs.

Usually, nothing makes him more content than this. Usually this is the happiest place on the whole damn earth, screw Disneyworld. He gets to be pressed all up against Eddie, and touch Eddie, and watch Eddie’s long sweeping lashes when he blinks, and how Eddie chews on his lip when he’s thinking, and how Eddie’s cheeks get all pink when he’s gotten to a good part in the comic. His world is always _Eddie, Eddie, Eddie_ but when they’re like this, it’s _allowed_ to be.

But today he can’t sit still, because—because last week, Eddie’s mom finally did it.

They’re moving.

She’s been threatening it for years, of course. Mrs. K hates Richie with a vile passion that Richie, for all of his jokes, happily and vehemently returns. She had hoped that Eddie would ‘grow out’ of hanging with ‘that Tozier boy’ but Eddie has not grown out of it, so here they are.

The fight that broke out was one for the history books. Richie wasn’t there at the time, but he didn’t have to be to know every detail before he even climbed into Eddie’s window that night. Apparently, according to Greta Keene who’s a grade A douchenozzle but good for gossip, the entire fucking block could hear Mrs. K and Eddie yelling their heads off at each other. Mrs. K blamed Richie for Eddie’s increasing rebelliousness, including his refusal to take his meds the last few years. Eddie called his mom controlling and psycho, somehow Eddie’s father got brought into it which is never good since that’s a sore spot with both parties, Eddie said he was independent and she couldn’t stop him, Mrs. K said _just watch me, young man,_ and from then on there was so much crying going on that none of the nosey neighbors could understand what was being said.

Richie’s not sure which Eddie hates more: the argument itself, or the fact that everyone in their shitty little town knows about it.

That doesn’t matter so much to Richie. What matters is that Eddie’s _leaving_ , and part of it feels like Richie’s fault. And Eddie won’t talk about it.

It makes his skin feel too small. Makes him want to go underwater and scream until his lungs burn.

“Stop squirming,” Eddie says around a yawn. It’s that kind of hot where you feel sleepy and you want to nap all day. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve napped in the hammock together.

If Richie was bold, if he had a brave goddamn bone in his body, he would flip himself over so that he and Eddie could knock their heads together and he could drape an arm over Eddie’s waist and they would nap that way, tangled up like… like couples were. Like how they used to when they were ten and didn’t know what it meant.

That’s what he wants to scream at people, sometimes. He doesn’t want to claim his own queerness so much as he wants to tell everyone that he doesn’t think about dick all the time. Fuckin’ teenage hormones notwithstanding. He wants to _cuddle_ Eddie. Like, that is his number one damn daydream. He’s a fucking sap and being… y’know… doesn’t make you a sexual deviant. It just makes you an idiot who wants to cuddle a cute boy and play with his hair and keep him safe from his stupid mom and the stupid world.

“If you didn’t want to put up with my squirming then you shouldn’t have joined me in here,” he says, because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know when to shut up. “I was here first.”

Eddie just huffs. He does that sometimes, like he’s set Richie up for the perfect punchline and Richie flubbed it—but Richie doesn’t understand what the joke is supposed to be.

Richie grips Eddie’s calf a little harder, feels like his hand was made for this, the bones of him curving naturally around Eddie, all of him’s made to do that.

Silence stretches on, and Richie can tell that Eddie’s not really reading his comic. His eyes are just staring at one spot on the page, not moving, and his nose is scrunched up the way it gets when he’s thinking.

Richie pokes him. _Pay attention to me_ is the mantra that’s ruled his life ever since second grade when Eddie yelled at him for talking with his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich and spraying food everywhere. If he’s annoying Eddie, then Eddie’s paying attention to him, and it’s safe. Eddie paying attention because he’s _angry_ is safe.

“Cut it out,” Eddie huffs.

Richie pokes him again.

Eddie throws down his comic. “Really? Really. You’re going to fucking do this right now?”

He’s speaking a mile a minute and Richie—Richie fucking loves Eddie’s motormouth, okay? It should be obvious to everyone that Mrs. K’s lying about Eddie’s delicate nature because Richie has never met anyone who is going a hundred miles an hour the way Eddie does. He’s a fucking firework, exploding with energy.

“You’re going to just keep being fucking annoying, what are you, a fucking kid, we’re not twelve years old anymore, dipshit, would it really be too much for you to just sit quietly so we can read some comics together!? Is that beyond your puny egotistical brain’s abilities!?”

Richie blinks, and then blinks again, because he can’t be seeing this right. “Eddie—Eds are you fucking crying?”

“I’m not crying, and don’t call me Eds.”

“You are, you’re crying!” He knows he should stop and pretend nothing’s going on, but as always, he can’t shut up his trash mouth.

Eddie slashes his hand across the front of his face. “Listen, I don’t know if it’s gotten through your thick skull yet, Richie, but I’m leaving. I’m _leaving_. And we know what’s gonna happen.”

Richie knows. He knows because he’s been trying not to think about it himself. “It’ll be different with us—”

Eddie kicks him. “No, it won’t, jackass. Stop—stop doing that thing you always do.”

“What do I always do!?”

“That thing where you just—refuse to fucking look at whatever you don’t want to look at.”

If he looks, he’ll be blinded. “Sorry that one of us doesn’t want to spend his last few days with his best friend in fucking doom and gloom, Eds.”

“Don’t call me Eds. Do you ever fucking listen to a thing I’m saying!?”

He listens to everything that Eddie says. He listens to the way that Eddie breathes. “What do you want me to do?”

The honesty of the question seems to blindside Eddie. “I…” He pauses. “I just wanted to have some good fucking times with you, y’know?”

“We can take pictures,” Richie says desperately. The words feel like they’re bursting out of him, forcing their way out like a volcanic eruption. “Make a whole album, put one in your wallet, go to the—the photobooth and take some there, you know ,so you don’t forget, because you’ll see me all the time so you can’t.”

“Yeah, because that worked so well with Stan,” Eddie points out.

Silence falls again. For all that he and Eddie never shut up, they’ve always been good with silences. They’ve always been comfortable with each other. This isn’t like that at all.

“You can’t fucking laugh, okay?” Eddie says at last. His voice is small. “I know I’m not allergic to all that shit now and I know I’m not gonna fucking die even though there are germs everywhere—but it feels like. Like I have a terminal illness. Like I’ve only got a few days left to live. Because when I leave if I forget… that means I forget my life and who I am and I’m gonna become this new person and I won’t be _me_ anymore.”

Richie doesn’t know what to say to that. What does anyone say to that, really? All he’s got are his jokes, and they aren’t that good. Not for this. “So are you saying you want to go bungee jumping?”

“What?”

“Y’know, that whole thing where if it’s your last day, what would you do.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “If it was my last day on earth I wouldn’t go fucking bungee jumping, do I look like a lunatic!?”

“Well sorry for thinking you might want to be adventurous and do something cool for once…”

“What’s cool about wanting to risk my life, what the fuck is wrong with you—”

Richie grins, because this is familiar, this is how it should be—and it hits him that he’s not going to get any of this soon, that this will all be taken away—and the smile slides off his face.

Eddie stops smiling too, and they both look away. Richie’s painfully aware of Eddie’s legs pressed up against his, of Eddie’s fingers curled around his ankle, of the way each breath he takes feels like he’s inhaling fire.

“What would you do?” Eddie asks. “If it was you?”

What would he do? If he could finally reach for the one thing he’s never dared, and it wouldn’t matter if Eddie hated him afterwards because he’d forget all about it when he left? Sure, he’d wait until the last minute to do it, but—Richie knows exactly what he’d do.

He shrugs. “I dunno. Say all the things I want to say to people. Tell your mom that I’m real sorry to end our affair like this, but she’s been a real piece of shit to you and she can go to Hell for it.”

Eddie snorts. “That’s what you’d do? Tell off my mom?”

“Well, yeah. She’s awful, Eds. You deserve better.”

“Don’t call me Eds,” Eddie says, but his voice is soft. Almost fond. “Sometimes I wonder if it’d be better if… if my dad was still around. Or if she’d still be the worst.”

“All the parents around here are the worst. Maybe she’d just be awful in another way. But. Yeah.”

Eddie’s father died of cancer. Richie’s not sure what kind, since Eddie doesn’t know. He does know it was fast, and unexpected, and that Eddie’s dad only had a couple of months before he was gone. Doesn’t take a fucking genius—and a good thing, too, since Richie might get straight As but a genius he is not—to make the connection about why Mrs. K is so fucking paranoid about germs and convinced that Eddie is sick and gonna die before he’s twenty-fucking-five.

“She deserves to have someone put her in her place,” Richie explains, feeling awkward.

Eddie stares at him for a moment. “You know that you’re a good friend, right?”

Richie’s not sure what to do with this. They don’t _do_ this, they don’t talk about appreciating each other. They don’t talk about how much they care about each other. Richie knows it, Eddie knows it, the others all knew it when they were here, before they left. But they don’t _say_ it.

He swallows. “You’re a good friend too, Eds. You’re the best.”

Richie’s never loved anything or anyone as much as he loves the Losers. He misses the others every day. He misses shooting the shit with Bev, trading smokes out behind the school. He misses how he and Ben knew how the other one felt, Ben with Bev and Richie with Eddie—they never talked about it, but sometimes they’d just sit together quietly, or Ben would look at him, or he’d put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, and that was enough. He misses how Bill was their fearless leader (and Richie’s first crush if he’s being totally honest), so charismatic, always mediating and keeping them together. He misses Stan, Stan the Man, his best friend in the whole fucking world, and how Stan was always so fucking done with him but would go along with his insanity anyway, rolling his eyes the whole time like he thought anyone actually believed he didn’t care.

They were family. They’re still family to him, even if most of them are gone. So it’s not like he loves Eddie more, he just loves Eddie a bit different. And he knows, somewhere in his bones, that he’ll never love anyone else the way that he loves these people.

Eddie smiles at him, and Richie knows, all over again, like he knows his stupid fucking heart is beating, that he’ll do whatever stupid thing he can to get Eddie to smile at him like that.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “You know that there’s nothing you could really do to make me hate you, right? I know that—you’re annoying as hell and I really want you to stop calling me those stupid names like Eddie Spaghetti and you don’t know when to shut up, but I don’t—I’m not ever really mad at you.”

“I know, Eds.” He knows when Eddie’s really, truly angry at him, those few times where he crosses a line and Eddie has his feelings hurt. Most people watching them would think that he had no idea where Eddie’s lines of comfort were, but Richie knows Eddie better than he knows himself half the time—he doesn’t know what he’s doing or saying or why, but he knows every single one of Eddie’s moods, his ticks, his fears, his dreams. He knows what each facial expression of Eddie’s means. He can read an entire essay in how tense Eddie’s shoulders are at any given moment. And so when he does cross that line, it’s an honest mistake, and he hates himself for it every time.

Luckily, he doesn’t do it very often.

“I’m not ever really mad at you, either,” he adds, because he feels that he should. “I can’t stay mad at someone who’s so cute.”

He’s been calling Eddie cute since before he knew just how much he meant it.

Eddie scowls. “I’m being serious here, Richie.”

“Well, hey, maybe so’m I,” Richie shoots out. It’s possibly the most reckless then he’s ever said to Eddie, dangerously close to the truth. “You are cute, all right?”

It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have to mean anything, someone being cute is an objective fact.

Eddie, to his shock, doesn’t get up in his face about it. He fucking blushes instead, and then he fucking—he fucking sits up and nearly tips them both out of the hammock as he half launches himself, half crawls his way to Richie. Eddie ends up straddling him, and Richie short circuits, blue screens, everything’s offline, bye bye. It reminds him of how he and Eddie used to always insist on playing Twister when it was him, Stan, Eddie, and Bill doing their sleepovers growing up. At the time he didn’t understand why he wanted to play that game, why he was so insistent on being tangled up with Eddie, pressed against him everywhere, but then when they did it one time and he popped a fucking boner that Stan definitely saw and pretended not to, he figured it out.

They stopped playing Twister after that, even though he’s sure that Eddie didn’t notice the, uh, incident.

“Whatcha doin’, Eds?” he asks, because if they hadn’t killed that fucker, he’d think this was one of those awful clown hallucinations, the ones that started out good to lure you in and then turned into your worst nightmare.

This would definitely be the part in the hallucination where Pennywise-Eddie would say something about how he knows Richie’s a dirty fucking fag, and that Eddie’s never going to speak to him again, and then the stupid clown would try and eat his face off.

Y’know, the usual.

“I’m, uh, y’know.” Eddie swallows. “I’m not very brave, but I figure, if it was my last few days on earth, this is what I’d do.”

“You are brave, Eds,” Richie says, and for once, Eddie doesn’t correct him on the nickname. The hammock is swaying a bit and they’re one shift of weight away from falling to the floor, so he lets his hands fall to Eddie’s thighs to help keep him balanced. It feels like the most terrifying chance he’s ever taken. “I know, I know we were all—we decided not to talk about it—but you beat up that clown one-armed, man, that was fantastic.” He grins. “Sometimes I… I get nightmares, and when I wake up I… I try to remember you just, fucking covered in mud and vomit and screaming how you’re gonna fucking kill It, I mean holy shit that was the best. You had your arm fucking broken and you were still bitching at me not to touch you. That’s brave.”

Eddie gets a soft smile on his face, the kind he gets when Richie buys him an ice cream, shit like that. Then his smile falters. “So you’ll… you won’t hate me.”

“I can’t hate you, Eds.”

Once again, he’s not corrected.

Eddie leans forward, until his hands are precariously braced in the hammock on either side of Richie’s head, just above his shoulders, and then he keeps going, and going, and going—until their lips press together.

He’s thought about this, more than he’ll ever admit, and always tinged with the taste of guilt, heavy and cloying on his tongue. But he never thought that Eddie, with all of his sharp edges, could kiss so softly.

He should’ve remembered that Eddie’s fear is because he’s really brave underneath, recklessly, terrifyingly brave, and Eddie’s sharp edges are because underneath he might be the softest of them all.

Eddie pulls back, blinking carefully, like he’s cataloging Richie’s face.

Richie would say something, but he’s forgotten how to breathe.

“You said you wouldn’t hate me,” Eddie says.

“Hold the fuck on, Eds.” Richie inhales sharply. “You just kind of blew my mind, I need a second here.”

It’s not like they just made out or something hot n’ heavy. It was just one kiss, a laughably chaste one for two sixteen-year-olds who are running on adrenaline and more hormones than they know what to do with. But it’s knocked Richie so far sideways that the whole earth looks different, at an angle, cockeyed.

“Yeah?” Eddie looks pleased at that. Richie’s made out with a few girls, because he had to stop all those rumors somehow, and apparently some of his classmates actually find his jokes funny and think he’s cute as a result. But he knows for a fact that Eddie’s never done anything with anyone—Eddie’s always said he didn’t want to.

“Yeah, not bad for a guy’s first kiss,” Richie says, because Richie’s an asshole.

Eddie rolls his eyes. Richie’s hands flex around Eddie’s thighs, not thinking, and Eddie’s face goes red.

“Wait.” A thought occurs to him. “You’re telling me that—how long have you—because if we could’ve been doing this the whole fucking time—I’ve had a crush on you since we were like, ten, you asshole!”

“I’m the asshole!?” Eddie looks offended. “You never said anything either!”

“Oh, right, because—” Whatever brilliant thing he’s about to say is cut off when Eddie kisses him again, this time for a bit longer.

“I don’t want to think about… all that,” Eddie admits, quietly. “About wasting time.”

Richie understands. “Okay. What do you want to do, then?”

For a second, Eddie looks like he might cry again, and Richie wonders once more why they all have to forget when they leave, why they have to leave at all, why he can’t keep the people he loves close to him. “Just this?”

He readjusts, sliding down so that their legs are tangled up and Eddie’s tucked against Richie’s side, his arm draped over Richie’s chest. Richie presses their foreheads together. “Whatever you want, Eds.”

When Eddie doesn’t correct him again, just tucks his head onto Richie’s shoulder, Richie adds, “Y’know if you keep letting it slide, I’m gonna think that you actually like it when I call you Eds…”

“Shut. Up. Richie. You’re ruining the moment.”

Richie worms his arms around Eddie. They’re fucking cuddling, it’s so cheesy and basic but it’s the _best_. Holding, and being held, something Richie hasn’t had in so long, it’s making his heart swell like the goddamn Grinch who stole Christmas.

He holds Eddie, and Eddie holds him, and they kiss a few more times, soft and slow. He’s always been rushed in his previous experiences, not really enjoying it and struggling with self-disgust that was so strong he’d always worried he might throw up. This is something he wants to savor, though. He doesn’t want to rush Eddie. And Eddie’s soft, switching between eager and tentative, acting like he’s got no idea what he’s in for but surprised and delighted by what he’s discovering. Richie wants to bury his face in Eddie’s neck and cling and forget the rest of the world exists.

They could do more. Part of him definitely wants to do more and Eddie seems to, or at least his body does, but the last thing he wants is to push too far. More than anything else, he just wants to savor this, lie here and think _this is real, this is real, this is real_.

But then he ends up falling asleep because it’s summer and they have nowhere to be and it’s afternoon and hot out and the sunlight filtering in is like a lullaby. And that’s okay, too. Eddie’s weight on him is the best thing for chasing away nightmares.

They do a lot more than kiss over the next week, but then, Eddie leaves. He moves. And he can’t even say goodbye the right way, not in front of everyone. He hopes, stupidly, beyond all reason, that Eddie will somehow remember. That Eddie will be different. That Eddie, Eddie who loves him, Eddie whom he loves, will call and write and visit.

But he’s also not surprised when he doesn’t.

* * *

Richie’s half-convinced that he’s been standing here like a lunatic for a full ten minutes, lost in the wash of a strong memory, but when he blinks again it looks like only six seconds have passed.

Because he’s apparently regressed to being thirteen now that he’s back in the hometown he literally forgot about until yesterday, he then rings the gong, everything in him screaming once again, _pay attention to me, Eddie, pay attention to me!_

He’s not sure how he feels. Eddie’s married now, Eddie doesn’t seem to remember anything, Eddie is a weird mix of awkward flirtation (“Let’s take our shirts off and kiss!”) and standoffishness.

But he remembers, he _remembers_ , that at one point Eddie loved him. At one point Eddie was staring down the barrel of a gun marked ‘loss of self’ and he decided that the one thing to do was kiss Richie Trashmouth Tozier. At one point all Eddie wanted to do was snuggle up to Richie in a dirty overused hammock and take a nap together.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about this. He could ask Ben, but Ben is a little busy making golden retriever eyes at Beverly and utterly failing at declaring his feelings. Bill’s no help, and Stan, the only one with a happy marriage, is still unconscious in the hospital because he somehow thought he was weak and would cause them all to fail. He can’t wait for Stan to wake up so Richie can yell at him for being such an idiot and then hug him for like, a decade.

So there’s nobody to really go to for advice. And he’s stuck with this memory that’s haunting him more than the actual murderous alien (alien!? Really!?) clown is.

But he has it. He has the memory now. He has the truth: Eddie once loved him back. Eddie was once his, if only for a few days. After all of his hiding, all of his lies, this is finally something that feels solid. Something he can hold onto like nothing else.

Now, he just needs to figure out what to do with it.

**Author's Note:**

> The title, I shamelessly admit, is a paraphrase of a line from "Return to Pooh Corner" by Kenny Loggins, which is a song about trying to get back to how things were, and who you were, in childhood.


End file.
